Nevertheless, it took another four years to explore, clarify and carefully reach consensus before ministers agreed to launch the new round. They did so in September 1986 in Punta del Este, Uruguay. They finally agreed to a negotiating agenda that covered virtually all outstanding trade policy issues. The objective of the talks was to extend the trading system to several new areas, in particular trade in services and IP, and to reform trade in the sensitive sectors of agriculture and textiles. All the original GATT articles could be examined. It was the largest negotiating mandate for trade ever agreed, and ministers gave themselves four years to finalize it. Despite the difficulties, ministers agreed on a set of initial outcomes at the Montreal meeting. These included certain concessions on market access for tropical products in support of developing countries, as well as a simplified dispute settlement system and the Trade Policy Review Mechanism, which provided for the first comprehensive, systematic and regular reviews of the national trade policies and practices of GATT members. The round was to end with a further meeting of ministers in Brussels in December 1990. However, they did not agree on how agricultural trade should be reformed and decided to extend the talks. The Uruguay Round has entered its darkest phase.
Although the EC formally agreed to implement the MacSharry Plan in May 1992, some obstacles to a GATT agreement remained. The EC was still reluctant to significantly reduce export subsidies and the question arose as to whether cap reform compensatory payments should be subject to domestic commitments to reduce support. The agreements for the two largest areas of the WTO, goods and services, have a three-part framework: at the end of 1991, the GATT Director-General presented a comprehensive draft of the Final Act, known as the Dunkel Project, in the hope of bringing the cycle closer to conclusion. The project concerned agriculture and all other areas under negotiation under the Round. It contained the first comprehensive text on agriculture, in which quantitative proposals were put forward for concessions in each of the three main disciplines. The agenda originally included in the Uruguay Round agreements has been supplemented and amended. A number of items are now part of the Doha Agenda, some of which have been updated. The Doha Development Round was the next trade round, which began in 2001 and was still unresolved after missing its official 2005 deadline. [3] The Uruguay Round was the 8th round of multilateral trade negotiations (MTN) conducted under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which ran from 1986 to 1993 and included 123 countries as “Parties”. The round led to the creation of the World Trade Organization, with GATT remaining an integral part of the WTO agreements. The general mandate of the Round was to extend GATT trade rules to areas previously excluded as areas that were too difficult to liberalize (agriculture, textiles) and to new and increasingly important areas that had not previously been included (trade in services, intellectual property, trade distortions).
[1] The Round entered into force in 1995 and the deadlines ended in 2000 (2004 in the case of developing country Parties) under the administrative guidance of the newly established World Trade Organization (WTO). [2] Two years later, in December 1988, Ministers met again in Montreal, Canada, to assess progress in the mid-term cycles. The aim was to clarify the agenda for the remaining two years, but the talks ended in an impasse that was only resolved when officials met more discreetly in Geneva the following April. The economic justification for the inclusion of agriculture in gatt was reversed, but the EC and some other countries were reluctant to adopt such an approach. In particular, the EC has opposed a substantial reduction in its export subsidies. Talks continued in the hope that an agreement could be reached by December 1990, the original date of the conclusion of the Uruguay Round. but the text presented therein was rejected by the EC, and the delay came and went without any agreement being reached. .